I'll show you another interesting thing about the structure of Marx’s Capital which, so far as I know has lain unremarked for the past 130 years.
There are 17 Parts to the three volumes of Capital. Take out the last Part of Volume One on Primitive Accumulation, which deals with an important historical feature of capitalism, and the remaining 16 part of Capital all have a certain form.
A particular unit of value is defined, for example in Part I of Volume One, “its unit being a single commodity,” or in Part II, “buying in order to sell dearer.” And in each Part, in addition to numerous particular units (e.g., usurers, merchants,...) there is a universal unit, e.g., money, or an industrial capitalist.
This structure runs right through all the 17 Parts of Capital, up to the last part which gives us the three sources of revenue - the form in which value appears on the surface of capitalist society, having begun with commodities and money at its abstract base in Part I.
Interestingly, the most famous collection of forms of value - constant capital, variable capital and surplus capital - does not have a Part devoted to its introduction. Why is that? Because despite its centrality to Marx’s analysis of the source of surplus value and the historical crisis of capitalism, this division of value does not constitute a step in the concretization of value as anticipated in the famous passage on the “Method of Political Economy” in the Grundrisse. And it is of course, the successive concretisation of the form of value which constitutes the basic structure of Capital.
This is not a “homology” of Hegel’s “Idea of the True,” or a “reflection” it, but it is in this passage that Hegel explains it in the context of the application of the Logic to a positive science. Despite this, Marx muddies the waters a bit by giving each Part a title framed in process nouns rather than as units.
Am I mistaken in saying that no one has observed this before? Why not?